Contradicting an earlier Dutch study, a new study finds that overweight people have higher lifetime health care costs after all.  So instead of getting a lifetime discount on their private health insurance and Medicare premiums, the obese should pay a bit more.  But not that much more.  Just eyeballing it, I would assess the fat tax at $300 per excess pound over a lifetime. That's less than 2 cents per excess pound per day of adult life — roughly the cost of an M & M.      

See my previous FYI.

Get ready.  Somewhere between 2016 and 2020, health entitlements, Social Security, debt service and national defense will consume the entire federal budget.  There will be nothing left for education, environment, highways – not even enough to pay the telephone clerk at the White House.

This is from a Gene Steuerle/Randall Bovbjerg article in Health Affairs.

An ounce of prevention may have been worth a pound of cure in households down through the ages, but in the world of health economics the adage, alas, is not true….

Even when prevention greatly reduces future cases of a particular illness, overall cost to the health-care system typically goes up when lots of disease-preventing strategies are put into practice. This is usually true whether treating the preventable diseases is cheap or expensive.

This is from an article in the Washington Post.

For more than a year, I haven’t received a single dollar from any insurance company. I work for my patients. A few hundred doctors across the country are working the same way, some in blue-collar towns. Routine care should be affordable to the middle class, and as more doctors and more patients form relationships that exclude insurance companies, prices will drop. Insurance doesn’t make routine care affordable; it makes it more expensive by adding a middleman. I know that some patients can afford nothing, so two afternoons a month I volunteer at a clinic that cares for indigent patients, which I could not have done with the huge patient volume I was seeing a few years ago.

This is a doctor writing in the LA Times.